Awesome Website Building Software

With the recent news that iHubbub was voted by the public as the Best Social Website in the Blue Drop Awards, in Portland, Oregan, I thought I would share some information for wannabe home business start-ups.

Budget is always an important factor when it comes to starting up a home based business so take a good hard look at how you want to create your website and what website development you will need, especially if you want to create an online home business.

The best thing about the website building software that we used for iHubbub is that it is free to download because it is Open Source.

Open Source software means it is free to download and having an Open Source Project means that there are hundreds ... no, probably thousands, of people, and most of them experienced developers, all over the world working on the software.

So you get the benefit of their experience and expertise for free. How cool is that!

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organise a wide variety of content on a website.

It offers a broad range of features and services including user administration, publishing workflow, discussion boards, news aggregation, metadata for optimisation and XML publishing for content sharing purposes.

Tens of thousands of people and organisations have used Drupal to power scores of different web sites. For example, Pimp My Site Club and Babyworld are powered by Drupal.

Types Of Drupal Sites

Intranet sites

Personal websites or blogs

Community portals

Discussion boards

Corporate websites

E-commerce shops

Resource directories

Social Networking sites

Personal websites or blogs

Drupal is perhaps the most complex CMS availabile, but it is without question the most powerful and flexible.

The downside is that it has quite a steep learning curve because it uses a fundamentally different approach to website architecture.

It is perfectly suited to community and membership sites, with many social features built in. It has an API, meaning it can play ball with other applications and websites, such as Twitter and Facebook.

It has a massive community of dedicated friendly developers, who create and maintain literally thousands of extensions, which will cover just about any requirement you could ever dream up.

Drupal has been successfully used on the following high profile sites:

Using Drupal may be overkill if you only need a small brochure site, but knowing what you can achieve highlights just how dynamic it is. On this occasion you could try Drupal Gardens, which is a hosted platform.

Remember to ‘Think Big’ when planning your future your business. Start small and grow with Drupal when you're just starting up a home based business.

The Pros Of Using Drupal

Robust and secure platform

No up-scaling problems - you can go from a small site to large traffic magnet, without issues

Flexibility - it can do just about anything you can imagine

Friendly free support and development network

Powerful user permission system

Different roles and permission for users

One module to install for a fully functioning e-commerce shop

Integration with other sites and applications

The Cons Of Using Drupal

Tougher learning curve than alternatives

Used primarily for large community sites with 10,000 plus visitors per day

Not designed for out of the box business websites

It’s made by programmers, not designers - it will do what you want, but may not look pretty so you may need some bespoke work done by a developer

Drupal Power For Building Websites

Drupal is not easy to get to grips with, although the new version 7.0 has several changes in usability which new users will applaud. Drupal stands head and shoulders above other CMS platforms in terms of flexibility and power.

Once you grasp the basics, you have the tools at your disposal to make your business website blast spots off the competition. All that’s required is your time and imagination. Drive over to Drupal at www.drupal.org and you can view tutorials on how to build you website using Drupal.

So there you have it, while iHubbub is very proud to be voted the Best Social Site 2013 in the Blue Drop Awards.

We were judged on innovation, best practices, content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality and overall experience. The competition was tough, and out of 130 nominees we came up tops.